Browsing by Author "Fafalios, Pavlos"
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    Historical Research meets Semantic Interoperability: The Documentation System SYNTHESIS and its Application in Art History Research
    (The University of Tokyo, 2022) Fafalios, Pavlos
    We present the SYNTHESIS documentation system and its use in the context of a large European research project of Art History, called RICONTRANS. SYNTHESIS is Web-based, multilingual, and configurable for use in other digital humanities fields. It focuses on semantic interoperability and achieves this by making use of standards for data modelling (CIDOC-CRM). The aim is the production of data with high value, longevity and long-term validity.
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    Towards Semantic Interoperability in Historical Research
    (Springer, Cham, 2021) Fafalios, Pavlos ; Konsolaki, Konstantina ; Charami, Lida ; Petrakis, Kostas ; Paterakis, Manos ; Angelakis, Dimitris ; Tzitzikas, Yannis ; Bekiari, Chrysoula ; Doerr, Martin
    A vast area of research in historical science concerns the documentation and study of artefacts and related evidence. Current practice mostly uses spreadsheets or simple relational databases to organise the information as rows with multiple columns of related attributes. This form offers itself for data analysis and scholarly interpretation, however it also poses problems including i) the difficulty for collaborative but controlled documentation by a large number of users, ii) the lack of representation of the details from which the documented relations are inferred, iii) the difficulty to extend the underlying data structures as well as to combine and integrate data from multiple and diverse information sources, and iv) the limitation to reuse the data beyond the context of a particular research activity. To support historians to cope with these problems, in this paper we describe the Synthesis documentation system and its use by a large number of historians in the context of an ongoing research project in the field of History of Art. The system is Web-based and collaborative, and makes use of existing standards for information documentation and publication (CIDOC-CRM, RDF), focusing on semantic interoperability and the production of data of high value and long-term validity.